


last ones standing

by penhaligon



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-08 18:44:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17986598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: Ben's only haunt options are the apocalypse or a cold dark slithering place, and he thinks that the universe must really have it out for him.





	1. Things That Weren't

**Author's Note:**

> Had this terrible thought: "What if Ben was still around after the apocalypse?" Haven't read the comics, don't know how anything works, and I'm definitely pulling stuff out of my ass to make my own Lore (tm), but I just needed to get this out of my system.
> 
> Content warning: Passing mentions of suicidal ideation.

During one of many futile attempts to get clean, Klaus spends nearly a month obsessed with trying to help Ben move on. It's meant well, a guilt-fueled mania that sees Klaus shaking and sweating with the effort to think past the fog of drugs and misery, to get right with his powers as if they hold the key to untethering Ben, but it ends like any other attempt to get clean.

Ben tries to explain that it's nothing that Klaus can do at the moment, that he's just stuck, but the crushing defeat of finding himself unable to see his brother safely to the other side - whatever the fuck that means - has Klaus circling right back around to getting high.

Which, ironically, only makes Ben feel guilty about it, like it's his fault that Klaus couldn't stay sober this time. He tries not to resent Klaus for that, and he succeeds somewhat. He gets it, he really does, even when he's begging Klaus to stop, to try a little harder, for fuck's sake appreciate what you have.

His is a cold world of numb not-feeling, static and fixed and free-floating, the polar opposite of the whirlwind of grief and torment imprinted on Earth that Klaus is trying to block out.

But if Ben could destroy himself from the inside out just to interact with the world at large, he thinks that he just might go for it.

* * *

Ben isn't quite like other ghosts. The ones who have moved on are no longer a part of the world he knows, though Klaus can - theoretically - summon them back. The ones who are stuck are tethered to a place or a person or an object within the world, whatever is most entangled with their death or their regrets. Ben is stuck too, but not to anything on Earth.

The other place, the place he goes when he relaxes his death grip on the world, is cold and dark and empty-but-not. It has no boundary or definition, only an endless expanse of void into which his consciousness sinks and dissolves like a drop of fresh water in an ocean. There are things slithering around in its depths that he can't see, only feel, and no sign of other human souls. It isn't the afterlife, whatever the afterlife may be. It's horrible, and Ben doesn't know why he's stuck there.

Maybe that's just the price you pay for being ripped apart by your own inner demons, literally. For being able to reach out and touch their home in the first place.

He tries everything he can to untether himself from the void on his own. He makes peace with his own death for what must be a hundred times, but it doesn't do shit, and something always sneaks up on him to let him know that he's not as good at acceptance as he believes. He tries using his powers, the sliding door shift deep within his metaphorical stomach that he remembers from a living body, but all it ever does is let him move as a projection between the void that holds him fast and the world he left behind.

In a dark moment, he tries provoking the slithering things within, hoping that maybe they'll finish what they started and devour him for good this time. But they just ignore him, and it doesn't take him long to sorely regret trying it in the first place, when Klaus cracks a joke and Ben smiles and thinks that he wants to end up wherever his siblings do, one day.

But stuck Ben remains, as the years pass by, with nowhere to go except a void and a world he can't interact with, no contact with anyone except Klaus and other ghosts, no forward momentum or change for the better. He doesn't know if it's possible to lose your mind as a ghost, but if it is, then he wonders if that's his end point. That, or the void, claiming him once and for all.

The only change in the world of the dead-on-earth is degradation, decay, the forward momentum of entropy and time grinding all things to dust, and is losing one's grip on reality a part of that? He'll press a hand up against a pane of glass over and over again, as if this time will be different and he'll feel the cool, smooth pressure beneath his fingers. He read somewhere that repetitive behavior with no change and no end, expecting something different every time, is the definition of insanity.

If it's possible for a ghost to lose his mind, then Klaus stands effortlessly and unknowingly between Ben and insanity, armed with terrible jokes and needy insomnia talks and bad movies, and Ben loves him for it, frustrations and all. But Klaus is stuck in his own kind of insanity, trying to numb something that can't be numbed as if the next time will be different and he'll be free of it all, and sometimes Ben thinks that he, too, is the only thing standing between Klaus and the deep end.

Often, he wishes that something, anything would change, if only so they can both stop feeling like their heads are only just above the water.

* * *

He regrets that wish after Dad is dead, after the so-called Umbrella Academy reconvenes to figure out what to do about it, after tensions run high and things get out of hand and Vanya shows up one night, the night they're supposed to decide what to do with the mansion, with eyes white and the world _bending_ around her.

His other siblings put up a good fight. But without Five, without Ben, they are no match for what Vanya has become.

Ben hardly recognizes the sister who always had a soft, kind word for him when he was shaking and brittle. Even as he screams his nonexistent throat hoarse, useless and helpless to stop it, he doesn't think she means to do it, not entirely. There's a point where Allison almost talks her down, but there's an uncontrollable rush to the power pouring out of Vanya, of a kind that Ben recognizes all too well, and a man with her, egging her on.

When it escalates again, as things are wont to do in their family, Luther manages to rip one of the man's eyes out, and Diego very nearly gets a good hit in on Vanya, before everything goes to shit.

After that, Ben isn't sure what happens. He's terrified and furious, and his grip on the world slips. He falls and falls, back into the void, the ocean of nothing with its slithering things in the depths, and by the time he breaches the surface again, clawing his way back to his world, there's nothing left.

The sky is gray with ash, and the mansion burns. Everything burns, like a great fire had swept across the planet. Like even the spirits of the dead had been purged by its flames - fire that had missed him, clutched in the sea's jealous embrace - because Ben calls out again and again, and no one answers. There should be dead, in the hundreds, thousands, those unable to move on built up over centuries and stacked up in a blink of Vanya's power, but no one answers.

He finds the bodies of his siblings in the rubble around the mansion, and he screams again, calling for them desperately. He even calls out for Vanya, whose body is nowhere to be found.

No one answers. Wherever their spirits are, it isn't here, and all of his dreams of ending up where his siblings do one day seem small and stupid now.

Ben doesn't know how long he stands there, dazed and frozen. How long he flickers between this world and the void, losing his grip over and over again, then pulling himself back, as if there will be something different waiting for him this time. He doesn't know when he begins to process it, in slow, agonizing pieces.

The world is... gone. Destroyed. Emptied. He doesn't need to walk its length to know that. The sudden hollowness presses down on him like gravity doubled. Even the _dead_ are gone.

And he alone remains. Stuck. Tethered to his void. Able to move back to this world in spirit only.

Back to an empty world. Back to no one at all.

His siblings are dead. Gone. Beyond his reach.

Klaus... Klaus is...

".. -anya!"

Ben doesn't know where he is. The world. The void. It all seems the same, terrible and empty. But someone is talking.

"Ben!"

His name. His name?

Called out in an empty world. Where no one is supposed to be.

Ben's bygone heart recognizes the voice with a twist of old grief before his mind does, and he materializes in front of the Academy in a flash.

... Holy _shit_.

Five looks exactly like he did the day he disappeared, exactly like Ben remembers, uniform and all, thirteen years old and looking as shell-shocked as Ben feels.

The sight knocks life back into Ben, relatively speaking. He isn't in the void. He's in the world, his world, his dead empty world, and so is _Five_.

Ben rushes forward on instinct, knowing only that it's his brother, whom he hasn't seen in so long, who used to brainstorm ways to control the slithering things for him with equations that never worked. Some part of him thinks that Five must be a ghost, that Five died that day after all despite the fact that Klaus was never able to conjure him, because why else would he look the same?

But Five doesn't react to Ben, doesn't see him, only stares like his entire world has been ripped out from under him. Which means that he's alive. Which means...

He'd been talking about time travel that day.

Oh, no. Oh, no no no no no.

Five takes it all in silently, like someone three times his age, and Ben follows him like a shadow. Five goes through the same motions that Ben did, eventually picking through the ruins to find the bodies, movements slower and heavier with each one. With growing recognition. He doesn't speak, not after calling out for his family. He doesn't cry. He stares like his brain simply refuses to make sense of it all.

"Go back," Ben tells him, even though he already knows that Five never does. That to go back would only mean dying here as an adult, unless Five's presence could turn the tide. But there's nothing here, nothing, and the thought of watching his brother suffer here and slowly starve or dehydrate or choke to death on ash while he can do _nothing_  is more than Ben can bear. "Please go back."

Five only screams and cries when he can't. When he holds his fists out, straining to move through time like he does through space, and when time refuses him, again and again again.

Ben stands in front of him, unable to speak to his brother or touch him as Five curls in on himself, nearly hyperventilating with the effort. How many times had Ben wished to see him again? How many times had he wondered what had happened to Five? How many times had he imagined the worst?

And how, he thinks, watching as Five gives up at last with a shudder that collapses into horrible, wracking sobs, had the worst never even compared to this?

* * *

Growing up had been fraught, to say the least. Being a Hargreeves had been bad enough, and being a Hargreeves with a bunch of monsters in your stomach had been uniquely miserable. When Vanya had looked on with a misplaced jealousy, Ben had told her that she was lucky.

Maybe not so lucky after all, in hindsight.

Ben had never really wanted to live up to the so-called family destiny. Not if it meant giving control over to the slithering things within him. Still, he'd tried. He'd tried so hard to make it work, to make Dad and Luther proud, and that's what had killed him in the end. If he'd listened to his better judgment and tried harder to shove the monsters further down, maybe he'd still be alive. Maybe he could have been around to turn the tide when Vanya's powers had unleashed hell. Maybe he could have prevented his now-little brother from landing on an apocalyptic welcome mat.

Five had tried to help him gain mastery over the monsters. Their powers were similar, he'd reasoned, manipulating dimensional space, only that Five's was localized and Ben's was far-reaching. None of the equations had amounted to anything, but working on them together - or rather, Five working on them and Ben offering suggestions and following to a point - had given Ben a peace of mind that was hard to get elsewhere. Sometimes he'd wondered if Five had known that, and that's why he'd kept trying, rather than out of any belief that he could find a solution.

In between his aloofness and his boasting, Five had always tried to protect Ben in his own way. Always been happy to obnoxiously draw Dad's attention to himself when he could. Always had a book to share or a rant on some subject he was interested in that served as a welcome distraction. Always had time for Vanya's music and company. Like an older brother, even though they'd all been the same age. Looking back, sometimes Ben thinks that it had been because of the ranking thing. Five had seen it for the bullshit it was long before the rest of them had, and perhaps making extra time for Ben and Vanya had been another of his little rebellions.

Then Five had gone and disappeared, and Ben had cried himself to sleep more times than anyone knew.

Now, the roles reverse, the pendulum swings. Now, Ben is the older brother, even though he's ageless and stuck and Five's been thirteen in his memory for a long, long time. Now, Ben's the one who's disappeared, more or less, and watching his kid brother struggle through those first few weeks, alone in all the ways that matter, while Ben can't return any childhood favors, is just under _dying horribly_ and level with _watching all of my siblings die_ in Ben's new list of _ways the universe is clearly out to get me personally._

Oh, Ben tries. He tries to make himself seen and heard like he did in the days after his death. It doesn't work. It never works with anyone who isn't Klaus. But there is no Klaus to hear him anymore.

Five doesn't cry like Ben used to, not after that first and only time. Not even when he buries the bodies as best he can, stacking what rubble he can carry on top of them with shaking fingers until they're out of sight, although Ben thinks that it's because he's still neck-deep in shock. It's not until Five finally opens Vanya's book that Ben sees anything like emotion befitting a thirteen-year-old again.

It takes him longer to start reading than Ben expects him to, after he finds the book. But at last, when Five cracks open the first page, Ben watches and waits with sick anticipation. He knows when Five gets to the first lines about Ben's death, because Five's knuckles go white, and he starts flipping through the pages madly. And Ben knows when Five gets to _that_ part in his chapter. His shoulders go rigid when Five's do, even though he has no muscles to tense.

Five reads the words over and over again, as if expecting them to say something different upon reread. When they don't, he snaps the book shut and slams it down, snatching his fingers away like it burns.

He stands, eyes watering, and Ben stands with him on instinct. His hands go out uselessly, reassuringly.

"I should have been there," Five says, breath hard and rattling as he faces Dolores.

It hadn't taken him long to start talking to himself and then to project that habit onto a mannequin he'd found and named, which Ben supposes is a reasonable reaction to being completely and utterly alone. Ben likes to talk back, even though it always makes him kind of want to cry. Still, he figures that Five has the right idea, that at least pretending to have direct contact with someone will keep him from going potentially insane in this completely insane situation. 

Sometimes it's almost like a conversation. "You couldn't have done anything, buddy," Ben says.

Five's hands tangle in his hair, tugging harshly as he screws his eyes shut against the tears. "I could have _helped_ ," he says, which is so much like a response that Ben almost forgets that Five can't hear him. "I could have figured something out. I just needed more time."

"I don't know if time would have been enough," Ben says, as Five's eyes open, head tilting towards Dolores. "You always helped me. Thanks for that, by the way."

Five's reddened eyes are still on Dolores. "It's not that simple."

Ben frowns, looking between the kid and the mannequin, considering the attentive expression on Five's face.

Is he... is he hallucinating a response from Dolores?

"He was my brother. I can't just accept this."

As Klaus would say: Christ on a cracker.

Ben finds himself pacing, for no reason other than to give himself something to do while he considers it. Dad did say that time travel could mess with someone's head. Something about an acorn? A metaphor? Not to mention what isolation does to the human brain, let alone isolation on the grand scale of the apocalypse.

Once again, Ben finds himself wondering what happens to ghosts without an actual, physical brain. Can a mind without a house fall victim to structural failure nonetheless?

Dolores seems to be "talking" for quite a while, and Ben ceases his pacing and finds himself utterly fascinated by the sight of Five actually listening to someone else for once in his life. Of course the someone else in question would be his own hallucination. Finally, Five looks down at the ground, something changing in his troubled expression. "... You have a point. Thanks, Dolores. I'll... I'll try to think about it that way."

Well... at least the inner voice projecting outward into Dolores seems to be kind, and thank fuck for small favors. Ben wonders where Five learned that, because it sure as hell wasn't from Reginald Hargreeves.

Then Five says, "Ben," soft and sad, and Ben's hypothetical stomach lurches. Five sighs, and it turns in a cough, wet and miserable. "Why did I think this was a good idea? What was I _thinking_?"

Ben rubs his incorporeal forehead with a sigh to match. What had Dad expected, relentlessly pushing an ambitious barely-a-teen past his limits over and over and then telling him that he wasn't capable? Pushing a reluctant teenager, who only wanted to keep his family happy and safe, into letting monsters from another dimension reach into this world? Christ on a cracker. _Fuck_ Dad. "You're just a kid," Ben says. "Kids aren't supposed to think. None of us should have been thinking about this shit."

But Five has always acted too grown-up for his age, and Ben can only watch, frustrated and mourning, as his brother holds back every tear with the force of Dad's shit awful parenting and gets back to the business of surviving the apocalypse.

* * *

For years, Ben's only haunt options are the apocalypse or a cold dark slithering place, and he thinks that the universe must really have it out for him. It must hate his whole family, in fact, and maybe the whole miserable planet, because everyone is dead, except for the unknown that is Vanya, who may or may not have been utterly consumed by her powers like Ben was, and Five, who navigates an apocalypse alone.

Ben hasn't missed the irony of it all. That only he and Five are left to walk the planet on the planes of the living and the dead. And if Five could hear him, how would he ever explain that Vanya, of all people, did this?

He has to admit, he feels a little bad for underestimating Five and thinking that he wouldn't make it, and relieved about the fact that Five is still around, and then _very_ bad for feeling relieved. He would give anything, anything, to see Five somewhere else, somewhere safe, but as things stand, Ben isn't alone.

It isn't the same as having Klaus, isn't the same as conversation and connection and inside jokes, but it's something. It's something, to know what happened to Five at last, to have a sibling close in this horrible lonely wasteland that is one of Ben's two shitty options. To have one-sided conversations with Five and Dolores that almost seem real at times, to watch Five try phone lines and rebuild semi-intact radio transmitters and get no response, to watch him travel far and wide for the same result, even though Ben could have told him that the planet's surface is so very hollow now. It's something, to watch his brother's brilliant mind dash itself against the impenetrable walls of time again and again.

It's something beyond good or bad. Something that, in the end, serves to keep Ben from cracking completely.

Sometimes Five does things like spend actual years fixated on calculating how to go back to save Ben alongside the rest of the world, vibrations of the universe that only Five can feel translated into hundreds and hundreds of numbers, and Ben lies there and stares up at the ashen sky and wishes that he could cry enough for the both of them, since his stupid big-little brother is too stubborn to.

There's a ragged cough, and then: "I've got it this time, Dolores," Five says, all grown up, somewhere in his early thirties.

"Sure you do," Ben deadpans, still nebulously in something that might be his twenties. He thinks so, at any rate. He hasn't checked in a while. He's stretched out on the ground behind Five with his hands folded behind his head, where the tarp that passes for ceiling ends, and he pretends that he's stargazing, even though the sky only ever churns with dusty clouds. He still doesn't know how Five isn't dead yet, between the sickly atmosphere and the piss-poor nutritional options. Maybe it's a side effect of having powers.

Five is moving, but Ben is too listless to glance over just yet. His eyes stay on the darkening gray haze above.

"What if I've got the foundations all wrong?" Five says, and he actually sounds a little excited.

Ben is pretty sure that he's heard this all before. He's pretty sure that he wouldn't kill someone to see the stars again, but he might consider it for a few seconds. Ben looks over to find Five positioning Dolores for a better conversation, so he makes himself get up too, dragging himself over to sit cross-legged beside Five.

"Dad always had me approaching the foundations of space-time as probabilistic," Five says to Dolores, fussing over her shirt needlessly before settling back with a muffled cough. "But my dad... was full of shit."

"You've got that right," Ben agrees with a snort.

Five pauses dramatically, then says, "What if it isn't probabilistic at all?" He waits a moment, as if to let it sink in, but the effect is rather dampened by another cough. He forges on. "What if it's deterministic, and the bigger picture is just difficult to see from where we're standing? There have always been alternative theories."

Ben looks at him cautiously for a long moment, then frowns. This isn't the first time that he and Five have talked space-time. It came up a lot when they were kids, and Five has spent years studying physics and more in the apocalyptic interim. It isn't the first time that Five has been determined to challenge the basic theorized tenets of reality, either. "If it's deterministic," Ben says slowly, "then how the hell do you factor in changing the timeline?"

"What if approaching it as probabilistic has been the problem from the beginning?" Five says instead, just before Ben has finished talking, which takes Ben out of the false conversation abruptly.

Ben glances over at Dolores's silent, still, serene face and tries not to feel jealous of a mannequin.

"If you fail to take hidden variables into account," Five continues, with a gleam in his eyes and a rattling edge to the breath he takes, "of course time travel is going to be a crapshoot. If there's a single universal configuration, you _need_ those variables. You need to figure out the pattern of the whole first to really work with it. Not as easy as it sounds, but once you have that, you _have_ it." He pauses to breathe again - not an easy task, sometimes - and aimlessly flourishes his hands, as if to tear open a hole in time with them. "You know exactly how pull the strings to get what you want. Much more plausible to reverse engineer through a single configuration, plus Ben and minus the apocalypse."

A single configuration... it takes Ben a moment to understand that Five is talking about reverse engineering the timeline based on knowing the quantum conditions of the _entire universe_ , which doesn't sound at all  _plausible_ to calculate. But, yeah, Ben gets the appeal of that, when playing dice with local probability nets you a lifetime in an apocalypse.

He starts to understand where this is coming from, particularly when he takes note of the bags under Five's eyes, the way he blinks a lot and sways a bit, the way he's coughing more than usual. The way he takes a sip out of a bottle of liquor that Ben had somehow completely failed to notice.

How had he not noticed? He's been tapping out again. Shit.

"Dude, you need to stop drinking and get some sleep," Ben says, with an ache in his long-gone heart.

Deterministic is easier to crack wide open and control, in a twisted, this-makes-perfect-sense-if-you're-Five way. Deterministic means that there's a straightforward path to engineer out there, if only someone is determined enough to shoulder the undertaking and find it. Deterministic means that any efforts to save Ben or stop the apocalypse can be precisely manipulated to avoid introducing positive feedback or a cascade effect into the so-called system, without some of your theoretical 1s deciding to become 0s just because they feel like it, thus dragging an entire entangled chain of events down an unintended path.

Deterministic means that your world can't be ripped out from under you at the cruel whims of chance. Other whims, maybe. But not random, pointless ones.

"Maybe you're right," Five says, and now Ben hears the slurred bent to his words. Five blinks down at his hands, glaring at them. "Sleeping on it sounds... good."

Sometimes, Ben and Dolores are on the exact same page, which lets Ben know that Five isn't wholly self-destructive yet.

Five is out like a light in the next minute, and for a while, Ben stares at the scribbled notes and calculations scattered on surfaces that Five has pulled together in the little library home he returns to faithfully time and time again. The notes on the properties of determinate systems, new and desperate. The equations meant to save Ben, more now than he remembers seeing before. He doesn't have Five's head for this kind of thing, but no longer does he trail behind by several steps. He can keep up easily enough nowadays.

Some of the numbers just lead back in time to before Ben's death - in theory, anyway - but Five seems to realize how fruitless that might be on its own, because the rest are dedicated to the same thing they'd once tried to figure out as children. Most seem concerned with shutting Ben's powers off entirely, this time - slamming the interdimensional gate closed, so to speak, and changing the timeline that way.

Ben stares at the numbers with a heavy heart and a strong desire to hug his brother for once in this miserable fucking apocalypse. He knows, by virtue of some sense that he's never been able to explain with quite the same eloquence and work shown, that these numbers won't work any more than the others did.

He doesn't remember Five writing half of this down, or the liquor, or even what year it's supposed to be. He doesn't know what he looks like anymore, if his projection in this world is the same as what Klaus saw years ago. He's been slipping, and he clenches nonexistent fingers, seeking to ground himself with a pressure he can't feel.

Sometimes Ben sinks back into the void without meaning to, when stress breaks his hold on the world, but the scary thing is that now he doesn't even remember the past few times until he concentrates. Even then, the memory of the experience is hazy and ill-defined. Like he's left part of himself in that other place.

But he's clawed himself back on instinct. Again and again. Like Five and his endless numbers. Like Sisyphus and his rock.

Ben doesn't wonder if it's possible for a ghost to lose his mind anymore. 

* * *

The equations are, in the end, as wishful as the ones concocted by preteens to contain the horrors within, never entirely balanced or plausible when simulated. Five doesn't quite give up on them completely, because he can't square only going back to save five siblings instead of six. Ben can hardly bear to listen to him rant to Dolores about it, to hear such frighteningly vulnerable descriptions of himself in Five's ragged, usually drunken voice.

How kind and smart Ben was in Five's eyes. How much Five is going to hate himself if he can't manage to fix every single thing that went sideways in his absence. Once, listening to him say those things to a brother who is and isn't there, instead of to Dolores, sends Ben plummeting straight back into the void. By the time he claws his way out, Five is sober and working furiously on a new integer set, so that's something.

Five's efforts to make the numbers work get desperate and sloppy, however, less about going back to a specific point in time and more about going back at all, to any point that would let him stop this wasteland before it happens. Whether or not that means Ben too.

"Sorry," Five says to Dolores, as he scratches and scrubs away at some of the failed equations on his favorite wall in order to make room for new ones. And then, "Sorry, Ben," tired and hollow, and Ben feels himself flicker and waver. The void pulls, like it always does. Ben silently tells it to fuck off.

"Shut up, man," Ben says, soft and fond and aching with a gravity that keeps him anchored to the world, this time. "It's okay."

None of this is okay, but Five starts again with fresh numbers, and Ben hangs on, and it's something.

* * *

Ben appreciates the failed efforts to move the equations from the realm of theory to plausibility, more than he could ever say even if Five could hear him, and all the more because it's fixations like that which keep his brother going.

Sometimes it feels selfish to want Five to keep going. After all, Ben is pretty sure that there's an afterlife of some sort, and the rest of his siblings are probably there. Wouldn't it be better for Five to be there too? Instead of here, motivated and toiling away for years and years in the vain hope that he can crack open time itself. Instead of here, despairing and wasting away but never quite able to put a gun to his head.

But Ben clings to the belief that something's going to give with everything he's got left, if only because he knows that he'll crack for good if he thinks too much about the alternative. He has to believe that there's a way out of this. That something will always swing Five back around to trying once more, whenever he gives up in fits of despair, and then convinces himself to try again, and then gives up, and then convinces himself again, ad infinitum.

Ben still tries to untether himself from the void sometimes, more out of habit than anything. It doesn't work. It never works. So he tells himself: if Five can find a way to get back, to prevent this apocalypse, then Ben can get Klaus back, and their family will be alive, and Five will be back with them, and Ben will never complain about being dead again. He'll appreciate all of the life around him that he can see but not feel. Hell, he probably won't even remember this, and all the better.

When the sky is the clearest that it's been in years, still dusty but settled enough for tentative green things to grow again, for sunlight and starlight to strike the face of the planet mostly unhindered, something that is ostensibly a woman shows up, who reminds Ben of things in the depths. He wants to tell Five not to trust her. He wants to tell Five that there are even darker shadows swimming behind her, just out of sight, things that he can feel but not see. He instinctively pulls back, closer to the void, and they don't see or feel him.

But even if Five could hear him, Ben doesn't know if he would speak up.

Five has always been just a little bit colder than the rest of them, and if there's anyone who could do this and live with it, it's him. The part of Ben that hasn't changed and degraded and decayed, that's still the same as the day he died, is appalled with himself for the thought. But the Ben that is old and very much dead is another story.

"Go," Ben tells him, though there's no need. Five is Five, even old and half-cracked and exhausted, and Ben can already see life sparking back into his brother's eyes, see the wheels turning in his mind. The supposed-to-be-a-woman can't see those turning wheels or doesn't register it as enough of a threat. She should. Ben knows that Five is brazen enough to take whatever he can from these people until he learns how to change things once and for all. "Please go."

It's a selfish impulse, Ben thinks, still appalled with himself as he watches Five accept far quicker than Ben would have in the same position. But Five is his older brother again, this time literally, and Ben is so very tired and stuck. He wants change. He wants change, and he wants out, and at the very least, Five will be free of this hellscape.

And when the air shifts and folds in a way that's distantly familiar to Ben, when Five leaves the wasteland and the ash and Ben behind to jump through time, the pendulum swings back.


	2. Things That Were

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thought I'd scratched the itch, but as it turns out, I had not, and I needed the other side of chilling in each other's hellscapes.

Sometimes, Ben doesn't know where the horrors end and he begins. It's a literal feeling inside his stomach, frequent visitors in the form of nauseous aches and pains, as if his insides have descended into anarchy because of the other visitors within. Sometimes he doesn't know when the twisting of his insides is only fear. When the aftermath of a mission hurts, deep and queasy and roiling, because he'd let the horrors out, or because he doesn't know how to feel about what he'd let them do.

Sometimes the nausea and discomfort keep him up at night. It's hard to sleep when his stomach is considering evacuation by way of his gullet, so he'll sit up and wrap his arms around his middle and try not to think about the latest testing or training session or mission. On those nights, he can never make himself grab a book to distract himself. As if they're nights meant for suffering instead.

They aren't supposed to be up at night, and they certainly aren't supposed to be in each other's rooms, but Five seems to know half the time, and sometimes he appears in a blink of blue, with a dry-erase board or two books in hand, unceremoniously shoved onto Ben whether he wants one or not. But Ben usually prefers to watch Five work through equations while he offers suggestions. It's easier than trying to focus on the words he usually loves so much.

"Am I a bad person?" Ben asks one night, with all of the whispered, ponderous gravity of a philosopher with blood on his hands. His arms hug tight around his middle as he sits on the edge of the bed with his legs folded under him.

The dry-erase board is perched against the vanity. Five pauses in his scribbling, turns, and makes a face, like he does sometimes when Luther and Diego argue over who knows best, or like Ben has just suggested that perhaps Einstein was a stark raving lunatic after all. "No," Five says with a tone to match, imperious despite the whisper. "Of course not. You're Ben."

And that's the end of that.

But it sticks with Ben for a long time afterwards: _You're Ben,_ implying mutual exclusivity, implying that the operational definition of his name is observably and measurably _not bad_.

He hadn't known that Five, always one for protracted arguing, could cut to the heart of things quite so concisely.

Looking back, Ben often wonders how Five had gotten away with it so often, when Dad had been obsessive about reinforcing rules. Goodness of his heart from the man who'd kept tabs on them with security cameras? Unlikely. There had to have been a clinical reason, and Ben has a few theories, most of them in the realm of letting problems pawn themselves off to someone else for remote observation. His powers had made even the ever-unflappable Reginald Hargreeves wary. Ben had known it at the time, in a distant sort of way, and it had been nothing but another source of anguish, then.

Later, though... well, maybe his sliver of smugness about it is mostly a coping mechanism, considering that he's dead and all.

* * *

Ben remembers the feeling of being compressed through space and time only once before, attached to a violent, disintegrative death that had consumed him from the inside out. This time is decidedly less awful, but that doesn't make it less _bad_. When he'd opened the gate within him for the slithering things to come through, it had never quite been all-consuming – at least, not until the end. He'd never been the one traveling.

The shift and fold reverberates down through every inch of his awareness, and it's like he's a specimen under a microscope, stretched and pinned. Everything, everything that ever was is looking into him, in the brief but eternal moment of sliding between the endless dance of charged particles and slipping past their resistance. But Ben is looking into everything, too. Seeing everything.

Things that were. Things that could have been. Things that weren't, but used to be.

Ben's nonexistent grip on Klaus clutches tight, as time and space bends and groans around them. He doesn't see the stage or the raging blue of Five's powers anymore. His head, his mind's eye are full. Dying earlier, dying later, mother and no father, not existing at all. Simpler fluctuations, too – right turn instead of left, no instead of yes, Camus instead of Checkhov.

He shies away from the overwhelming could-have-beens. He's going to be sick.

Ben blinks, or he doesn't, and in shying away slams headlong into a wasteland full of ash and destruction pouring into in his brain.

Earth, devastated, ruined. The aftermath of some terrible cataclysmic event.

The apocalypse.

Years and years, stuck with no Klaus to listen to him, but Five to listen to. Five, a child, a young man, an old man. A terrible existence of nothing carved out in an empty planet. Empty, empty, why was it so empty?

Something _wrenches_ with terrible force, and Ben loses his tether to Klaus. He can't see his siblings anymore. Klaus is no longer at his left, Diego is no longer at his right, Allison and Luther and Vanya and Five are no longer in his line of sight. He reaches out blindly, desperately for Klaus, for the familiar pull of his energy like catnip for the dead, but his brother is nowhere to be felt or found.

There is only the bending and shifting and folding of everything all at once, caught between particle and memory of things that were and weren't. Ben tries to reach again, comes up empty again. His siblings are being ripped away, in too many different directions, and he can't do anything when he is only a presence, a spirit, a projection.

He's falling. He's being pulled. The sky churns with ash, settling gradually across decades. The terrible fire that had left such ash behind had not been able to touch him, even in death. Someone screams in agony, and with a surge of furious desperation, Ben does what he knows on instinct – he reaches to protect, even though there is no Klaus to help him grab Diego or crush the people trying to kill his family.

The slithering things wrap around somebody and cradle them close, and Ben lands in an ocean of nothing and sinks. It feels like he's drowning, robbed of air, dying all over again, slow and suffocating this time. But he can't, he _can't_ , he needs to breathe, and there's someone else here, and he doesn't know where his siblings are, and god fucking _damn_ it, he thinks to the depths, you are going to _listen_ to me.

* * *

Afterwards, Ben wishes he had a more dignified awakening, he really does. He's conscious of blinking, of bitter cold, of his cheek pressed up against something slimy and scaly. The awareness of it hits him with a frightening jolt. Dizzying, dizzying _feeling_ – razor-winged breath scraping through his lungs, and alien skin against his face, and inner ear throbbing like a struck gong. There's a deep ache all throughout his body, but most especially in his nose, like something's been rammed upwards into it, and in his stomach, like something is trying to slither up to his throat and eject itself.

Wow. Feeling kind of sucks, sometimes. He remembers, vivid now, how much time he used to spend sitting up in bed or curling up on the bathroom floor, trying to hold his queasy insides together.

And then he realizes that he's lying on _skin_.

Ben shrieks and scrambles up, but he can't see anything. It's like he's blind, like the sun has gone out, and there is only slimy, slithering skin beneath him, holding him up. He can't seem to get to his feet, and there's too much, too much to feel all at once. His body feels wrong, small, off-kilter, his inner ear pulsing like an off-beat drum with it all, and he falls, skittering back on his hands some more, as if there is something to run from.

His hands brush against something that is blessedly normal: an arm, attached to a body, a warm body. Another shock jolts up his spine at the contact, giddy and strange. It grounds him enough for his brain to turn the volume down on the signals demanding attention, as it picks one to focus on. The warmth, in contrast to the biting cold of the air on his shivering skin. The warmth of a living thing. Tears spring into the corners of his eyes, reflexive and grateful, and they burn like sparks.

But Ben's relief lasts only as long as it takes for him to work out that it's _Five's_ body. As he turns around, coming to rest on his knees with his hands clutching the person, he hears a rattling intake of breath.

And Ben remembers like a punch to his aching gut. He's heard that sound before, in not-memories that are his and not his. Toxic air that made Five as sick as Ben used to get, that should have killed him, but never did.

The not-apocalypse. The second apocalypse. The jump. His _family_.

"Five," Ben says, and in the chill air, his voice echoes strangely, claustrophobically. He grasps blindly at the small, trembling body, and realizes that it's bigger than him and not by much. His own voice is... tiny.

Oh, shit.

 _I need light,_ Ben thinks, wondering wildly if Five might be carrying something that he could use to make some.

Instead, light spirals out from underneath him, blue and bioluminescent, igniting like strings of holiday ornaments and snaking like swirling veins under the skin that stretches out around him. Ben watches, open-mouthed, as the light spreads in whirling patterns, first in all directions around him, then climbing steadily upward, then finally coming to a peak above him. Enough light for him to see that he's hunched over Five's sprawled form in a cold sphere of glowing, nearly translucent, blue-veined skin that wraps around them protectively. Like a bubble.

He can almost see what lies beyond it. He doesn't want to.

Ben stares, his stomach twisting so badly that, for a moment, he thinks he might really throw up. Something claws its way up his throat, demanding exit. But with breathing so practiced that it's still automatic and a flash of wonder at the sensation of it, tender and icy though it is, he files it all away under things he'll process later, because Five stirs again, rasping like there are shards of glass somewhere in his chest.

In the pale light, he looks like shit, colorless and wan. Like he's the dead one now, even though Ben can feel his warmth. Five's eyes flutter, and Ben takes note of the blood trailing out of the corner of his mouth.

Ben had coughed up blood sometimes too, when the horrors had been particularly brutal in their emergence and pushing them back to the void had taken everything he had. Sometimes he hadn't known if it was his own blood or the blood of other people that had gotten into his mouth. Sometimes it had been both.

God, their lives are fucked up.

"Five," Ben says again, his head aching, his stomach aching, and his throat convulsing like something wants to get out. It hits him like another punch, this one almost a knockout, because Five is so goddamn small, and Ben is smaller still. He's in his kid body, which had never been good at handling emotions to begin with, and it's been so long since Ben has truly felt them as a physical thing. He's sitting in a bubble of slithering skin with his brother who's wheezing like his insides have been rearranged, and he doesn't know where the rest of his siblings are. Klaus had been in his grip what feels like minutes ago, and now he's _gone_. Ben's voice breaks. "Don't you fucking die on me, man, come on..."

"Since when d'you swear?" slips out of Five, fuzzy and slurred. His eyes are still fluttering like he isn't quite awake.

Ben laughs, a shaky sound, and a ghostly wisp of frigid air curls in front of him. He tries not to imagine that the walls of the skin-bubble are closing in on him. It's manageable, with Five's voice echoing off of them. "Since I died."

Five's eyes pop open at that. He looks at Ben like he's only just become aware of his presence, head flopping with the effort, and then he pushes himself up, slowly and painfully. Ben's fingers clutch at Five’s jacket, trying to help, but Five curls into himself at the contact. Ben can tell that it's reflex, and as he scoots back to give Five some space, he tries not to let it hurt. He almost succeeds, and he notes, absently, that he's wearing the same jacket as Five. The same uniform. He's conscious of the way it hangs loose, a size or three too big, with too many folds, too much fabric, with dark stains lining the sleeves.

Another rattling inhale, a cough, and Five's eyes lock onto him. He sits hunched and tense, like a hurt animal with no burrow to dig into, and he's shivering as much as Ben is. His expression is raw, and yet Ben can't quite read it. He has no clue what's going on in his brother's head, except that it is, understandably, a lot.

Ben wonders, abruptly: does he really know Five anymore? He knows a boy from childhood, and a man from an aborted timeline, all jumbled together in his head now, but the boy had not had death and the apocalypse stacked on top of him, and the man had thought himself alone, with only his Dolores for company, vulnerable in a way that he might not have been otherwise. That he isn't now, after everything.

And Ben feels like an intruder. His arms wrap around his stomach like they used to, a mechanical reaction to pain and a source of comfort, an attempt to find more warmth and get the shivering under control.

Five's eyes snap downward, and a little bit of familiar worry enters his expression, before his gaze lifts, observing the dimly lit enclosure that wraps around them. When he looks back at Ben, his expression is more controlled. Wary. Absently, he wipes the blood away from his mouth with the edge of his sleeve. "I don't know if this is real."

It is said so very, very calmly for such an unsettling admission. Ben swallows. His not-memories of watching Five react to varied hallucinations float hazily in his achy head. "When we were kids," Ben says, fully aware that it's his little teen voice speaking the words, "you used to write equations for me. They were supposed to help me control..." He uncurls an arm from his stomach to wave a hand at the skin surrounding them, at the void beyond. He can't say it, why can't he say it? "They never worked, but they made me feel better. Like I had some control anyway."

Nothing in Five's expression or posture changes. He watches Ben like a gazelle watches a lion, and it is so _very_ disconcerting. After the fight in the Icarus, Ben is pretty sure that Five could kill him with his pinky finger. "Yes," Five says, "but I already know about that, and any hallucination of mine would too."

Christ on a bike. Why does he have to sound so clinical about it? "Well," Ben says, summoning up every bit of patience that he'd ever used with Klaus and finding himself in short supply. He'd thought it had been a pretty touching recollection himself. "If you're gonna argue with your hallucinations, then there's no fucking point to this conversation, is there?"

Five is utterly still, as immobile as the stupid statue of Ben at the Academy, except for when shivers break through. Then something quirks upward at a corner of his mouth – almost imperceptible, but for the way his entire face shifts with it. A little softer, now. He leans back, less of a defensive animalistic ball and more of an exhausted sprawl, resting on his hands. "Nice to see that death finally gave you some bite, if nothing else."

Ben can't help it. He snorts, and then it turns into a crazy laugh. Some of the tension and fear and confusion escapes through it, the release shaking a body already trembling from the cold, leaving room for something a little warmer to take root. It hurts, though, tugging at his stomach and reminding him sharply of the queasy discomfort there, and he forces himself to stop, shaking his head. "God, you're a piece of work."

There's an actual smile hiding at the edges of Five's face, and for that singular moment, things feel alright. But there's a bubble of skin enclosing them within a void, and a ruined world left behind, and their siblings are... somewhere. There's no tearful reunion, not with urgency cloying the chilly air.

As much as Ben might, deep down, want one.

There's something tinged hollow in Five's little smile as his eyes flick back up, and when he speaks, Ben starts to notice the labored quality to it. Or Five starts to let it show. "Ben," Five says, smile vanishing, and what follows sounds less like a question and more like another grasp at confirmation that he hasn't lost his damn mind, "where the _fuck_ are we?"

The skin cocoons them in bioluminescent almost-translucence, masking shifting shadows beyond. The moving patterns of light and shadow cast Five's face into configurations that make him look older and younger in turn. The blue is a sickly, pale color. It makes Ben's eyes hurt and itch with the need to look away.

"This is _their_ home," Ben says. He'd dragged Five into his own personal hell, and while he's reasonably certain that Five can get out, he can't help but wonder, with a sick, sinking feeling of dread in his already twisting gut, if he'd made things worse. "I could feel something going wrong, and I panicked. They pulled you here with me. Sorry."

But Five shakes his head. "I was..." His jaw twitches and tightens. He coughs, turning away but not quite able to muffle how wet it sounds. "I lost control. I think you saved me." His voice gets quieter, raspy edges softened.

Something leaps in Ben's chest, reeling the sinking dread back up from his gut. It's... dizzying to think about, when Ben has now saved Diego, saved all of them. It's dizzying to be able to _do_ things again, to help, and this time, he hadn't even needed Klaus to do it. He'd saved Five all on his own.

Ben glances at the skin around them, at the pulsing blue glow of bioluminescent lines. His eyes still hurt, but the desire to look away isn't quite as strong.

Then Five seems to understand plenty all at once, putting things together that Ben is only just starting to grasp himself, because his face blanches with sudden, muted horror, drawing Ben's attention back. "... Vanya said there wasn't much left to bury," Five says, looking Ben over again, studying this time.

Ben had seen him find and read the book, in another life. Seen him find the crumbled remains of the statue and cling to hope anyway, until some opening lines crushed that and Ben's chapter drove it home.

Five looks faintly sick. Almost angry. He leans forward, off of his hands. "You've been _here_?"

Ben nods, suddenly hyper-aware of the nausea churning in his stomach still, of the dozens of goosebumps on his arms and legs. Of the input-output ratio of his brain where sensation is concerned, and how very demanding it is.

His breath scrapes up his throat, and it's loud and razor-sharp. The pressure behind it pushes on the back of his throat, the nausea seeking to break free and empty his stomach of absent contents. If there was anything in him to throw up, it would probably win. His crouched legs ache. The point between his eyes aches. He's hungry. Oh, god, he's hungry, and what an awful fucking feeling that is when he's queasy and stuck in a bubble of slimy alien skin.

He doesn't know if his body, his _remains_ have always been here or not. He doesn't _want_ to know, doesn't want to think about the stains on his jacket. It's not like he's been very conscious of himself when his awareness has been here before. But the ability to explain, to ask Five not to press any further, drowns in his throat, overcome with every other feeling under the sun.

Five considers it, his eyes growing unfocused. His hands rise up to curl into his hair. He hardly seems aware of the movement, of Ben, of anything at all. "I was trying to take us back," he says, exhaling slowly, and Ben latches on to the sound of his breathing like a drowning man. It stutters like static, but it isn't quite so direly asthmatic anymore. "Far enough that we could do something for Vanya, but not so far that we'd end up in completely useless bodies if I cocked it up again. Far enough to save you by default." He drags his hands down his face. His fingers shake. "We should be there. You should be there."

Ben closes his eyes and pushes the spark of hope down and then down some more. Not now. Not when there is so much else that needs fixing. His stomach twists even more, and he doesn't know if it's the hope struggling to break free or the slithering things coiling around it and dragging it deeper. He has to swallow to keep himself from retching, but behind the blackness of his eyelids, the sensations are a little less overwhelming. He spends a few seconds there, gathering himself.

When he opens his eyes, he again uses Five to pull himself up out of the terrible ocean of far too much feeling all at once, and he takes in the look on Five's face. The slump to his shoulders. Like he gets when he's drunk sometimes, and not in the dialed-up, self-aggrandizing, ten-million-slightly-off-calculations-a-minute way, which Ben knows from memories of things that now exist only in his head, in Five's head. Punch drunk, maybe, from trying and mostly failing to jump back in time with six passengers, to move against the current of a so-called fixed point.

Passengers. Family. Focus, focus, focus, Ben. "Where did the others go?" he asks with effort, urgent.

Five shakes his head. His eyes are dull, distant now, and his arms wrap around one of his angled knees. It makes him look younger, more like his surface age. "I don't know," he says, like a confession of some horrible sin. He's always hated those words. "Something... unraveled when we jumped. Time feels... wrong."

"It's this place too," Ben says. He sucks in a breath and draws himself up a bit higher, even though that's not saying much. His inner ear immediately tries to sabotage him like he'd offended it personally, but he doesn't sink back down, even when his entire sense of balance lurches. His legs and knees are starting to hurt in earnest from the crouch, exacerbated by the seeping cold, but stretching them out feels like heaven. "Time is different here." Not so different that Ben's living body can't exist here thanks to Five working his magic, but different enough to shelter them from the worst of whatever Five did. "Can you feel the home continuum? Five!"

Five blinks and looks up at him.

"You need to focus," Ben tells him, tells himself. He has no idea what the jump did to Five, physically or mentally. It doesn't look good. Ben doesn't feel good. They theoretically have all the time in the world, and yet they don't. He'd wanted his life back so badly, and yet having a body is so _inconvenient_. They need food. And water. And sleep. And warmth. And probably medical attention too. "The... the dimensional walls or whatever, they're thin. Shouldn't be too hard to sense what's happening back in our time. You said something unraveled. Can you feel it now?"

Five looks down at his hands. His brows furrow. "I don't know," he says again, with a thrum of anger behind it. "It was a _cascade_ , Ben, it doesn't _feel_ like our time anymore." His voice rises with the words, sharp and biting, and a cough follows.

Ben bites down on the natural question: _What did you_ **_do_** _?_ Instead, he swallows his matching, rising irritation and falls silent. He watches as Five clenches and unclenches his hands. Watches as his brother glares at those hands with unmasked frustration and hatred. Ben has seen that look before, in another lifetime, lived and not lived. His own anger evaporates without protest.

"You're right," Ben says. He'd forgotten how heavy sadness sat in his stomach. As heavy as the slithering things and the fear of them. As heavy as those nights of nausea and misery. "A determinate system would make this a lot less like throwing darts at a map."

Five doesn't absorb it lightning-fast, like he does most things. He goes still, hands clenched, wracked by intermittent shivers, and his head lifts slowly. He looks at Ben with his face held rigidly blank. "What?"

Ben's arms tighten around his middle again, as if to contain the shivering. Every tremor makes his teeth clatter and ache. The cold air itches in his nose and throat. Nauseous pressure trickles up his esophagus, but he swallows and thinks past it. "When we jumped," he says, keenly aware of how Five watches him without blinking, "I started remembering things, about something that never happened. In a timeline you changed. I was there." Three times now, he's seen Five at this physical age. This is the oldest that Five has ever been in any of his memories, and now he keeps trying to match that to not-memories of a Five who is actually old and weathered. It blows his mind a little bit. "In your apocalypse. Um... I was with you."

The tension in Five's frame ratchets up a notch. His eyes widen by degrees as the words sink into him slowly, and shock and realization crack his mask open, bit by bit. He tilts back a little, as if to recoil. Ben knows better than to let that sting. It still kind of does.

"Who else?" Five asks, almost a whisper.

It takes Ben a moment to push past all of the signals in his brain and catch up. "No one," he says, and Five's eyes narrow. "It was... it was like the world had been... _emptied_. The only reason it didn't get me was because I wasn't there when it happened. I got pulled here." An arm unwraps from his stomach to gesture vaguely. "There weren't any ghosts when I came back. There was nothing. Just me. And then you." The irony of ironies, missing and dead and yet the only ones left to linger, in the end.

"No one?" Five echoes, and there's a growing and abject horror on his face, immediate intellectual curiosity at the revelation stripped away by something much worse. "Ben..." he says on a coarse, shaky exhale, "I didn't know..."

"You couldn't have known," Ben says. Impulse takes over, or maybe it's just the abrupt wave of dizziness that cascades through him. He leans forward, and one of his hands latches on to Five's shoulder. The contact jolts through him again, like punching Klaus and hauling Diego out of harm's way and stumbling across Five in the dark. He wonders when that will stop. If it will stop. If he'll ever get the chance to grow familiar with it once more. For now, it serves to quiet how loud everything else is. It's a little easier to think straight, all of a sudden.

Five is stiff and warm beneath his fingers, and Ben only squeezes his shoulder as the dizziness subsides. He wants so badly to hug his brother, but he doesn't.

In the blue bioluminescent light, every line of Five's face is pronounced. In his distress, it makes him look older. "You shouldn't have had to go through that." He says it frustrated, like he could have and should have done something to prevent it. And he had, the idiot.

Speak for yourself, Ben doesn't say, and his heart _aches_  as he wishes that he could do the same. Could jump to that day, and grab on to Five before he runs from the room, and hold him back. And aloud, "I _didn't_ , Five."

His other hand latches on to Five's other shoulder, and this time, it's only the desperate need for contact, for the way it turns too much into manageable. He's pushing it, he knows he is, but Five lets him. Five always lets him. Ben remembers their first mission, how miserable and sick he'd been, and attaching himself to Five's side like glue under the glare of the cameras. 

"I remember bits of it," Ben continues, "but that was never me, this me. Because _you fixed it_." Fixed it by breaking something else for the time being, but that doesn't make for as good of a speech. They'll deal with that later. "It hasn't happened, and maybe it never will, thanks to you."

He realizes that he's drawn himself up again, that he's kind of looming over Five now while he grips his brother's shoulders, which is an odd place to be. If Five wasn't so exhausted, Ben might expect him to blink away. But Five only looks up at him for a moment. "You know, I killed a lot of people to do that," he says, quiet, resigned. Like he's testing the waters to see if Ben will take it all back and reject him instead. Well, too fucking bad.

"I know," Ben says. And then, after a breath: "Like I was saying: thank you." Which might be an asshole thing to say in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, but he doesn't care. Five isn't the only one with blood on his hands.

All that matters is that it disarms his brother completely. Five's eyes widen, and his face goes slack, and some part of Ben that isn't brittle and tired and nauseous finds a little room to be smug. It's always been near impossible to catch Five off-guard, but Ben is setting and breaking enough records today to put an Olympic athlete to shame.

"So," Ben says, and reluctantly, he lets go of Five's shoulders and rocks back on his heels. His legs ache. His stomach hurts. He shivers. "We need to fix this and get our family back. We know you can change the timeline, and we know I'm like, immune to half of this shit so far." 

He pats at the ground – skin – beneath him, in equal parts camaraderie and revulsion, shuddering at the sharp-edged softness beneath his fingers. The void or its inhabitants, his powers and his own unconscious will had pulled him safely away from whatever had really been going on in the opening moments of the apocalypse, from the fraying whirlwind of a timeline cracking under the weight of system instability. It's... a lot to process.

He's always been powerful and painfully aware of it, between his role as the team's biggest guns and Dad's opposing desires to control and exploit. But this... he's never really felt power like _this_. He's never connected with it like this until now, never called forth air and light by asking for it. Never known that being able to slip out of the grasp of forces much bigger than him, wrapped in the protective embrace of slithering things, could feel so... good.

It's too much to think about, so Ben pulls his focus back together, navigating past the many, many physical sensations that immediately want to crowd into his thoughts. His uniform hangs too loose, except for where it's stiff with stains he won't think about. An ache throbs behind his eyes like it was shoved up through his nose. The blue light is pale and wrong. But he doesn't need to look away from the cocoon around them. "Between that, we've got to be able to do _something_."

Five is staring like Ben just rearranged the quantum foundations of the universe. A long, long few seconds pass, and Ben has the fleeting, irrational thought that he, Ben Hargreeves, did what the apocalypse and time travel could not: broke Number Five's brain completely.

Then Five seems to give himself a little shake, and he nods once, jerky. There's some reactivity there. Good.

Next up in the order of priorities: "Now, are you okay?" Ben asks.

"It doesn't matter," Five says, automatic, frowning. Reactivity returning in impeccable form to deflect, as usual. Oh, he's infuriating.

Which is why it catches Ben completely off-guard, turning the tables, when Five moves to slump forward into him with a little rattling sigh of resignation.

Ben isn't aware that it's supposed to be a hug, at first. His initial, panicked thought is that Five is hurt more badly than he'd realized, but when he tries to extract himself to get a better look, Five only tightens his grip around Ben's sides, head buried against his shoulder, and then Ben understands.

It's clear that Five hasn't actually initiated a hug with another living person in a long, long time, but that's okay. Ben hasn't either.

Once the panic subsides, Ben's brain is full of a pleasant, buzzing warmth, that makes him forget about his twisting, nauseous stomach, and the chill blue light, and everything that's far too much about being thrust back into a body in a cold, cold void.

He never, ever thought he'd get this. He never thought he'd be able to touch Klaus again, and yet he had. He never thought he'd see Five again - not alive, at least - and yet he had. Not only as a ghost, but both of them in the flesh. Even if they're stuck in bodies out of time, and Ben is remembering that having a body is the most massively inconvenient and poorly designed thing in the universe.

But maybe the universe has decided to let up a bit, after piling an apocalypse on top of them.

"I missed you," Ben says, carefully wrapping his arms around Five. The sparks burn at the corners of his eyes again, and he has to clear his throat to get the words out. The tears that track their way across his face are small, but jagged. It feels like they carve grooves on the way down.

He still would have died, he thinks, even if he'd had Five's acerbic support throughout their teen years. One variable would not have unraveled that knot of fate. But he's wondered about it sometimes.

"I..." Five says, and because he might shatter without jabs or know-it-all fact dumps or grandiose statements to hold him together, the words get stuck. But Ben waits patiently, and he knows that Five can hear him waiting loud and clear, and finally, something is pushed out, low and hesitant, trajectory clearly changed. "I couldn't find you or Vanya, and I thought..." Five sighs. His breathing still grates like something's not quite working right within his respiratory system anymore. "Well, you know, yeah?"

Coward, Ben thinks fondly.

"I wish I'd known," Five adds. The words are muffled against Ben's shoulder, the guilt so palpable that Ben thinks he can taste its salt-tang in the air. _I should have been there,_ Five's voice says in Ben's not-memories, young, grieving, filling in the gaps in the cold air around Ben and Five, left by things not quite said.

And in a flash of insight, Ben thinks - because he _knows_ Five after all, doesn't he? even this different version - that maybe Five is hiding his face because he simply doesn't know how else to deal with that degree of feeling... exposed, other than pulling away entirely. The obvious effort not to do so is painfully apparent now. He's trying, for Ben's sake, and Ben resists the urge to hold him as tight as he can.

And once again, Ben feels like an intruder. Like he'd engaged in a colossally fucked up version of reading someone's diary without permission, without meaning to. He dares to pat Five's back a few times, apologetic, and when Five doesn't seem to mind, Ben's fingers cautiously trail upward to run through his brother's hair. It gives him a few extra moments to work up his courage. "You were good company anyway, I think."

Okay, so maybe Ben is a coward too. He doesn't know how to ask forgiveness for it. Can't bring himself to ask yet, not when he's just as brittle and they can't afford to let any dams break just yet. He doesn't think he needs to ask, exactly, because he'd always been an exception to Five's general ire. But he wants to.

They aren't intact memories the way his childhood is, but enough has bled through. They'll need to talk about it eventually, if they get the chance in less dire times. It'll be like pulling teeth, probably. But it'll happen if Ben wants it to. He got his almost-tearful reunion, after all.

Five pulls away and pulls the warmth of proximity with him, but Ben doesn't notice the chill half as much. Five doesn't meet Ben's eyes. He looks to the side with a small, huffed, humorless laugh, and then clears his throat with another cough. His gaze is far away. "We're gonna save you," he says eventually, an addendum to Ben's earlier declarations. There's a determination to it that Ben once saw in another life, a goal not quite given up completely, now that a chance is dangled in their faces.

"Five," Ben says, a warning, to his brother and to the unbidden spark of hope pulled up from the depths of his stomach like a fish to a lure. He'd seen, during the jump, the knot of possibilities around his death. How none of them had carried an alternative, only a different timetable. He wipes at his face, at the tear tracks there.

"Don't," Five says, his eyes snapping back to glare, and a bitter smile flashes across his face with it. He understands at once. Maybe they still know each other better than Ben thinks. "I saw it too, but nothing is completely fixed in time. If the Commission thought so, they wouldn't be trying to stop me, and if I thought so, I wouldn't have any hope for Vanya."

But he does, and he has hope for Ben. Hope, or the willingness to play a dangerous game with causality to make some for them. In some ways, he hasn't changed at all.

Nothing is fixed so tightly that it can't be unscrewed, and any pattern can theoretically be rewoven, even at the most complex knots. You just introduce a cascade effect into the system when you try. Not that Five seems to give a shit. In some ways, he's even worse than Klaus. How that other Ben didn't have the ghostly equivalent of an aneurysm is a mystery that will never be solved.

But Ben doesn't say anything further, only gives him a capital-L Look and lets it be. There will be time to argue later, but in the meantime, he thinks that Five needs it right now. The belief that he – that _they_ – can pull off the improbable. Can tear at the walls of time until their fingers bleed and come away with something worth the effort.

Ben's arms fold in front of his stomach as he watches Five get wobbly feet under him to examine the bioluminescent cocoon shielding them from the void. He answers Five's questions about the void and its properties as best he can, more calmly than he feels. His insides don't twist and churn quite as badly as they had when he'd woken up. The chill, the aches, the hunger, the sounds of his own breath in his throat - he filters through them and is able to think, clear and sure.

And maybe, Ben thinks, he needs it too.


End file.
